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MAPS April 2025A Night 2: Toky(A)o Drift

Not a sunset picture. I took this earlier in the day (I actually went outside! It was not 100 degrees out, so I decided to enjoy the weather.)

For the first time, Bianca and I are the only AOistas at the AO station for the entirety of a run. After last night’s work, we felt motivated to close the loop. In fact, I would even say we felt confident in our abilities to do so. We began the start of the night CACAO processes while making constant WFS pupil adjustments. Normally our pupils don’t drift this much, so we decided to check the pupil imager. Sure enough, our pupil image was vignetted.

Flashback to last night:

After alignment, we worked on booting up CACAO and acquired an RM. While checking RM modes, we noticed modes were not looking AO ready. They should not have chunks taken out of them. This led us to check the pupil image. We saw the same vignetting we see today.

Not smooth RM modes. Notice the chunk taken out in the bottom right corner of each | Photo Creds: Bianca Payan.
Vignetting as a result of MIRAC being off the center of rotation.

Our solution was to adjust alignment in the periscopes and MIRAC dichroic. With the remaining time in the night, Bianca and I were able to get to the part of the CACAO process where we open up the gains gui that allows us to close the loop. At this point, we did not notice any extreme drifting. Unfortunately, we were receiving errors while trying to open the gui, and sunrise was just around the corner.

Back to present:

Just as last night, Oli and Maggie adjusted the MIRAC dichroic and top-box periscopes. Bianca and I proceed to CACAO, but continue to face the same drifting issue. We now realize this vignetting/drifting issue is very repeatable. Our suspicion is that this is due to MIRAC being off the center of rotation. To test this, we realign to the telescope chief ray to see how AO performs without MIRAC. By the end of the night we are able to close the loop on 20 modes with minimal drifting. This was a bit tricky, as we did not have a PSF to reference as we were closing the loop (MIRAC is very useful for PSF imaging). Unfortunately, we cannot easily determine how good the loop is working purely based on vibes and what we can see from the acquisition camera.

Bianca and I closing the loop on 20 modes without the MIRAC PSF.

We came to the conclusion that we do not want to proceed using MIRAC this run. Our plan is to hopefully get PISCES installed before tomorrow night so that we can continue with the optimal setup to perform AO. To be continued…

Stay tuned for the next chapter of the MAPS April 2025 run!

The song of the night is “Drift Away” by Uncle Kracker.

MagAO-X 2025A Day 12: Step Up to the Plate

Like our new friend Emi mentioned in her blog post, there were a lot of us on the mountain yesterday. Josh, Eden and I rolled up to LCO that morning after a smooth trip from Tucson, and Matthijs joined us later that afternoon. As fun as it was to have (nearly) the whole crew down here at once, the arrival of reinforcements meant Parker, Jay, and Alycia all headed down into La Serena this morning. We wish them better luck in their journey home than they had on the way here.

unclear whether the matching outfits were accidental or if Parker is slowly morphing into Jay

Before I talk about tonight, I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out the alignment work that Laird and I did yesterday afternoon. With only the power of a ball driver, a suction cup, and a pair of tweezers, we managed to correct the mis-clocking of one of our Lyot coronagraph masks. If you think you have steady hands, try holding them both at arm’s length on-and-off for two hours while navigating a minefield of extremely sensitive optics that stand in your way. This was a task not for the faint of heart—or the large of hands.

the way the spiders line up is *chefs kiss*

We had a beautiful albeit chilly sunset to kick off our night. Logan and Emi went vizzy-spotting, because it is simply impossible to have too many viscacha photos.

a good omen

Tonight we took a lot of data in MagAO-X’s Hα mode, which is a mode of operation that we use when we’re looking at young systems undergoing active planet formation. The first half of the night was dedicated to our collaborators at Michigan, and we spent the second half observing some targets from our very own Laird Close and Jialin Li. Because Jialin joined on Zoom, we were blessed with a reluctant guest appearance from Jujube:

Conditions were decent, so science went on pretty much uninterrupted for the entire night. At the end of the night the wind started to pick up, but we didn’t let that stop us from taking data until it started to get light outside.

“That’s no moon . . . it’s a space station!”

In other news, we’ve been making some critical advancements, pushing the boundaries of extreme AO beyond what has ever been seen before. No, I’m not referring to automatic gain optimization, or coronagraphic low-order wavefront sensing, or even electric field conjugation for quasi-static speckle nulling. Instead, I’m referring to Maggie-OX: our trusty computerized voice that, among other things, now contains a variety of . . . walk-up songs? Picture this: you’re about to sit down at the AO station in the control room. You’ve got a long night ahead of you, battling r0 and τ0 and all the other nuances that come with extreme AO operation. You’re a little stressed, and more than a little tired. Then, suddenly, in the distance, you hear it: the little speaker at the control station playing your specifically-designated hype music. People are clapping, cheering even. You’re sauntering up to the computer in slow motion. Fireworks explode in the background. It’s a scene straight from a movie. You were born for this.

Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic. But it is fun to have a theme song, and laughter makes the nights go faster. It’s the little things.

Song of the Day:

Just Like Heaven – The Cure

MAPS Apr. 2025 Night 1: Six Degrees of Freedom

It is the start of the second run of the semester. The night was focused(pun intended) on alignment and understanding how each one of the movements of the telescope, science camera, and Wave Front Sensor. And what it comes down that each one affects the other and it takes a lot of abstract scratching of head to figure out what happens when a move is done.

The Bad news this run is that the IR Wave front sensor did not make it to the mountain. But we now understand what the problem was. We have been extremely lucky that it worked at all. This is a problem that has been inherently sneaking up on us and we had never been able to figure it out. Turns out that the PCB feed through of the cryostat as it shirinks when it goes to cryo makes contact through hole mounting screws. Good news is that we have a path forward and the fix will soon be implemented.

So the hope for tomorrow night is that the wind stays slow and we get clear skies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn1qkf8vVQU

MagAO-X 2025A Day 11: New kid on the block!

Hi everyone! I’m Emi, a second year undergrad at U of Michigan. This is my very first time observing, and blogging! And basically being nocturnal. I’m learning that we are the largest group for MagAO-X yet… so here’s to all 14 of us!

Today, we got to go on a tour of the Henrietta Swope and Irénée du Pont Telescopes. As a true Gen Z-er would say, the du Pont telescope was trippy! The telescope was stationary while the dome was rotating, of course, but it wasn’t so straightforward! Look below to see what I mean:

After some… questionable dinner… it was observing time!! I got the chance to help my advisor, Logan, with collecting data and also collecting data for my project!

As you’ll see, the image to the right is of E Hya and her beautiful wee-little companions. Spam incoming of some great images we got as well as good wishes, courtesy of Sebastiaan:

“I wish you all of the seeing! No wait… I wish you none of the seeing!”

Sebastiaan Haffert, 2025A

Now spam incoming of some great photos I got from ’round town:

Overall my time here at LCO has been really great, in part due to the wildlife. Viscachas are the sweetest looking bunny things, and the foxes here have the fluffiest tails. “He’s so fluffy I’m gunna die!!!” – Agnes, Despicable Me.

For now, to all a good night, and to none of the seeing! (Another movie quote?? Hallmark??)

Song of the Day

https://youtu.be/gte3BoXKwP0?si=NLrbmffK4S72GKch

MagAO-X 2025A Day 10: It’s so over

While most of our heroes were still sleeping, Sebastiaan and I went up the telescope to perform some EFC calibration. At first the dark hole digging didn’t seem to work, and it took quite a bit to fix it. Fortunately, just before dinner time we finally managed!

We are astronomers and we are digging a hole DIGGY DIGGY HOLE

Tonight, the MagAO-X team experienced yet again an hard truth: Bad nights are part of the game. This is why the title of this blog post is unfortunately the opposite of my previous one. If you want a visual representation of this, check this out:

Thanks to Joseph Long for this pearl

At the beginning of the night, Sebastiaan tried to perform EFC on AFLep, but with a seeing between 0.9 and 1.4 arcsec and a PSF that looked like the control loop was not even close, we expect the dataset to be good to be thrown in the trash. At some point we gave up, switched to the internal source and did some engineering and more EFC calibration. We managed to take some more data afterwards, although the seeing was still around 1.

We continued with Alycia, who got two lucky hours of decent seeing and observed an edge-on disk …All this before having to close the telescope because of a huge conglomerate of clouds approaching the telescope. Time for some more engineering in lab mode and watching a movie chilling on the amazing Clay furniture.

Clay in the moonlight with clouds + a quote from one of my favorite cartoons

At least we have pictures of animals

Enjoy heartwarming wildlife pictures from today’s selection:

Song of the day + movie

During our time with the telescope closed we have talked a lot about movies tonight, and especially Disney movies. So, today the movie I want to mention is my all-time favorite Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. I want to quote what I decided to be also the song of the day, “That’s What Makes the World Go Round”, in which Merlin explains to Arthur how opposites continuously balance our existence. Very yin and yang, right?! I utterly love it.

Left and right
Like day and night
That’s what makes the world go round
In and out
Thin and stout
That’s what makes the world go round

For every up, there is a down
For every square, there is a round
For every high, there is a low
For every to, there is a fro

Merlin, in The Sword in the Stone (1963)
That’s What Makes the World Go Round from The Sword in the Stone (1963)

Bonus cloud song

Since we watched the Eurovision movie because of the clouds, today you get a bonus song: What a masterpiece.

Ja Ja Ding Dong – Eurovision song contest: The story of Fire Saga